The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
There exists a gap in current information technologies between spreadsheets and documents with their ease of use and flexibility—and relational databases with their organizational structure, configuration management, and query capabilities. A large number of users are managing a large portion of their information in spreadsheets and documents because of the relatively large investment required to develop and maintain a database. Many organizations never develop databases due to the expertise required to develop and manage a database. In other organizations, databases may exist for certain types of information, but for ad hoc and recently created/acquired information, the information is at least temporarily managed in documents and spreadsheets.
The present invention is directed towards lowering the investment barrier for information management systems by providing an intuitive and organically-built information management service that is both easy to use and flexible, yet capable of queries and configuration management normally associated with relational databases.
A similar gap exists in the domain of public knowledge bases, such as WIKIPEDIA and FREEBASE. For example, WIKIPEDIA lacks the relational structure and query capabilities of a database, whereas FREEBASE lacks the ease of use and flexibility of a spreadsheet or document tool. Thus, for society at large, there is lacking a comprehensive public database of information that the average Internet user is likely to contribute to in meaningful ways.
Effective and efficient management of information is key to the success of many complex endeavors, ranging from running a business enterprise to managing a large research and development project.
The technological solution described below to flexibly store this kind of information in a way that can be queried falls under the realm of graph theory, where information is organized into entities, and then relationships are built by combing entities with relations. As entities are linked into relationships, the resulting graph forms an interconnecting web of relational information, which is searchable via queries of these relationships.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention have been developed.